Page 15 of The Little Liar
That night, the Krispis family slept in their new “home,” a dirty, one-floor flat with no bathroom, no beds, and no sink. They shared this space with two other families, fourteen people overall, their hastily packed possessions now stacked against the wall. It was all that remained of the life they’d known that morning.
Tanna didn’t care about her lost kitchen, bedroom, or the hutch with her beloved dishes. She kept crying for her son. “You have to find Nico, Lev! We can’t leave him out there!”
So Lev went to search the streets, only to discover that all of Baron Hirsch had been enclosed by wooden walls and barbed wire. He spotted a man he knew from the tobacco business, a squat, bearded merchant named Josef, who was staring at the barricade, as if examining a math problem.
“How do we get out?” Lev asked.
Josef turned.
“Didn’t you hear? The Germans said any Jew trying to reach the outside will be shot on sight.”
Udo Finds a Place to Stay
As evening fell on Kleisouras Street, the temperature dropped and the rain turned to light snow. A transport pulled up to the Krispis family’s now empty rowhouse, and Udo Graf stepped out. He ordered a soldier to fetch his valise. He paused at the acacia tree and ran a finger under its budding white leaves. Then he entered the stairway to the main level, passing Pinto, his translator, who held the door open for him.
Udo looked around. He had wanted a place near the city center and the Nazi headquarters nearby. This would do nicely.
“Find the biggest bedroom and put my things there,” he told Pinto. He was claiming the Krispis house for his own, the way all the desirable Jewish homes had been claimed by German officers—and all possessions within them usurped. The Nazi soldiers even wore the suits that were found in the closets and sent the nice dresses home to their wives.
Udo saw nothing wrong with this. Quite the opposite. It all seemed rather pathetic to him, the way these Jews surrendered what they had so meekly, like mice being chased out ofa hole. To him, it proved they didn’t deserve such things in the first place.
He plopped down on the couch and bounced a few times. If he had to be stuck in this country, the least he could expect was a comfortable couch at the end of the day. He was happy to have earned his large assignment from the Wolf, to oversee the deportation of the entire Jewish community of Salonika—fifty thousand of them!—but he privately wished it were closer to home and the cooler skies of his motherland. He did not like anything about Greece, not its summer heat or its noisy people. He couldn’t understand their multiple languages. And the food here was strange and oily.
As he pressed into the cushions, he glanced at the remnants of the family who had lived here this morning. Some toys in the corner. An old green tablecloth. Porcelain plates in a hutch. A framed photograph of a family at a wedding.
“What time is it, Pinto?” Udo asked.
“Just past eight, sir.”
“See if they have any brandy in this house. Or whiskey. Or anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Udo leaned back in the couch and removed a small notebook from his uniform pocket. He made notes at the end of each day, his accomplishments, his thoughts, the names of his collaborators. Having read the Wolf’s story in a book, he felt his own existence might be chronicled one day. He wanted the details to be accurate.
As he wrote, he felt his gun press against his thigh. It occurred to him that he had not shot it since yesterday.A goodsoldier should fire his pistol at least once a day,a senior officer had once told him,like emptying your bowels.
So Udo reached for his luger and dragged it slowly across his line of vision, looking for a target. He settled on the framed photograph. He pulled the trigger and fired, blowing the frame off the table, shattering the glass, flipping it wildly before it landed on the floor.
Which is when Udo heard a thumping sound. He rose, curious, and went to the stairs. He dug a fingernail into the frame of a crawl space door. When it pulled open, he peeked inside, coming face-to-face with a blond-haired boy whose blue eyes were bulging.
“Well, now,” he asked Nico, “what do we have here?”
Acceptance
Of all the lies you tell yourself, perhaps the most common is that, if you only do this or that, you will be accepted. It affects your behavior with classmates, neighbors, colleagues, lovers. Humans do a great deal to be liked. They are needier than I can comprehend.
I will tell you this much: it is often futile. The truth is (there I go, referencing myself) people ultimately see through efforts to impress them. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but they do.
The person trying to impress Udo Graf was a Jewish dockworker named Yakki Pinto, an individual who, for most of his life, had longed for acceptance. Mustached, reed thin, never married, fifty-three years old, Pinto lived in the eastern end of the city and walked an hour to the docks every morning. He had few friends and little education. He spoke with a stutter. Before the war, he mostly kept to the boat he worked on and the filtered cigarettes he smoked.
But Pinto’s grandmother was born in Hamburg. She had lived with his family when Pinto was growing up, and he’d learned the German language from her.
When the Nazis entered Salonika, they created something called the Judenrat. The word itself translates to “Jewish Council,” but I have spoken about the power of twisting language. There was no “council” being sought, just a sham to pretend that Jews had some control over their fate. Those who joined the Judenrat were charged by the Germans with implementing their orders, as were the Jewish “police” established under their control. And while some in these positions tried to stave off the harshest Nazi indignities, most were viewed by fellow Jews as collaborators not to be trusted.
Pinto had volunteered for the Judenrat almost immediately, and Udo Graf had determined his German skills could be useful. He could translate the gibberish these Greek Jews were speaking.
“Your task is simple,” Udo had told him. “You translate what I say, and you tell me exactly what they are saying. No lies. No deviations.”
